People thought Ed Peruta was crazy a decade ago when he sued a supermarket for charging him 48 cents state sales tax on a roasted chicken.

But his lawsuit, which was eventually settled out of court, shed light on the fact that grocery stores in Connecticut were improperly collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars from customers for such takeout items.

Peruta, director of a nonprofit group dedicated to Second Amendment rights, has been following the stories about gun owners who were improperly charged sales tax on gun safes purchased at Walmart stores in the state, even though firearms safety equipment has been exempt from the levy since 1999.

With gun-safe purchases reaching high water marks nationally after the December 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, questions have been raised about the amount of money Walmart and the state have taken in, and how it will be returned to consumers.

"The state of Connecticut should consider the fact you've already burdened us with registrations and everything else," said Peruta, who now works as a legal investigator for a Torrington attorney. "Come to our defense and get the tax dollars back."

While a Walmart spokesman continued to insist that the retail chain, which has 33 stores in Connecticut, does not charge sales tax on exempted items, the state Department of Revenue Services is planning to issue a news release clarifying the issue and explaining how anyone who has a receipt showing he or she paid it can get tax money back.

"If you think this happened to you, go back to the store and say, `I have my receipt, it says I made this purchase and you charged me sales tax,' " DRS Commissioner Kevin Sullivan said.

Along with the increase in firearms purchases over the past two years, there has been a corresponding rise in the sale of safes to secure them, said Ron Southwick of Southwick Associates, a Florida firm that conducts economic and market research for the hunting, fishing and outdoor recreation industry.

"We know from 2012 to 2013, shooting accessory sales went up because firearms sales went up," Southwick said. "There was a 10 to 12 percent increase in gun safes alone."

The dollar value of the sales, and a breakdown by states, wasn't available, But Southwick said "big-box retailers" such as Walmart, Sam's Club and K-Mart, account for about 15 percent of the market, with Walmart alone responsible for about half that amount.

"The sales of gun safes have been very brisk," agreed Mike Bazinet, a spokesman for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for the firearms industry based in Newtown. "We've come down from the peaks, but the valley floor is higher."

Walmart spokesman Brooke Buchanan said she could not provide the company's sales figures for gun safes because the retail giant is "in a quiet period until Thursday," when it will announce its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2013.

She said the incident reported by Hearst Connecticut Media on Sunday -- in which a Brewster, N.Y., man paid more than $30 in sales tax on a gun safe purchased at the Walmart in Danbury less than three weeks ago, despite showing proof that the sale should have been tax-free -- was an error that was quickly corrected and "not representative of company policy."

But a Ridgefield man subsequently reported that he had also been charged sales tax on a safe he purchased at a Walmart in Norwalk in December.

On Monday, a Hearst reporter visited the Walmart on Connecticut Avenue in Norwalk, where two sporting goods clerks said they didn't have any knowledge that gun safety devices are tax exempt.

The store doesn't have gun safes in stock, but sells perhaps one or two a month on the Internet to customers who pick them up at the store, the employees said. One of the two employees, who said he has worked at the store for seven years, said, "We don't have the option to not charge taxes."

The other said, "We haven't heard of anyone telling us about that. Anything you sell, there are taxes on. Nobody ever told us that. We only do what the register tells us to do."

A manager at the Connecticut Avenue store declined to be interviewed, referring all questions to the store's highest ranking manager, who the manager said would be back in the store on Tuesday.

Hearst previously contacted all 33 Walmarts in Connecticut, and 16 that carried the gun safes said they were taxable items.

State Sen. L. Scott Frantz, R-Greenwich, the ranking member on the Legislature's Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee and a gun owner, said that while the situation was unfortunate, the amount of tax dollars at stake might not be as much as some might assume.

"Typically, if you spend a lot on a gun safe, you're not going to buy it from Walmart," he said. "Walmart sells very low-end gun safes for handguns, a shotgun or two."

Sullivan declined to comment specifically on Walmart, but outlined how his agency generally would approach any business under similar circumstances.

"First -- stop doing it. Second, you owe all the people who come to you and produce a sales receipt a refund of the sales tax. And third, if we got a sense it was in many locations ... we'd ask for their sales records and try to determine whether they had remitted the tax (to the state)," Sullivan said.

"If somebody makes a mistake, we're mostly interested in correcting it going forward and getting the taxpayer their taxes back. However, if it does appear tax was collected and not sent in, that's a different story and that starts to get on the edge of fraud.

"This happens not a lot, but it does from time to time," Sullivan said. "Most of the time it's innocent. Somebody's made a mistake, got sloppy."

Peruta said he learned during his lawsuit that the Department of Revenue Services doesn't have an incentive to crack down on improper application of the sales tax.

"The state of Connecticut has a financial advantage to saying, `We're getting more money, let's just keep our mouth shut,' " he said.

"I'm glad a consumer was smart enough to figure out something was wrong and chose to go to the media," Peruta said. "That's the only way you get to inform other consumers ... That's the only way to have a check on government."